Nothing is more important about knowing your community than knowing its people. People matter more than businesses, governments, roads, schools and other organizations. Learning who your neighbors are can be exciting, terrifying, easy, and difficult. Many forces are at play to keep us from connecting with others. Let’s explore how to know those closest to you better, as well as how to overcome common barriers.
It sounds simple: know the people who live closest to you. Your neighbors should be the easiest thing to know about in your community. They are the closest people to you, geographically. This could be in the same building, a house next door, or a farm down the road. They share the same roads, side walks, parks, activities, schools and stores. Yet, many times knowing neighbors is the hardest and scariest thing one can do. How can we move forward and know the people who make up our community?
Take the Initiative
Most people do not prioritize knowing their neighbors. They typically do not think about it as something they can influence. It’s not that they don’t like the neighborhood or don’t want the benefits of having good neighbors; they just don’t pursue it because they are preoccupied with other things. Walk the Block hopes to foster a community of people who want to change that dynamic and become known neighbors who add value to the places they live.
Start with a Focus Area
Learning the life story of every neighbor over the next month is not realistic. Instead, think of this as a journey with different stages requiring different focus areas. Start simple and build from there. Put yourself in someone else’s shoes and take the long-view of this. It’s not about knowing someone better in two days. It’s about thinking how to move toward the goal of knowing your neighbors better in one month, six months, and two years. Just like any relationship it should begin slowly. It can be intentional or spontaneous, not everything has to be planned, but spontaneity is seldom enough to know your neighbors. You have to initiate. Below are a few great ideas that have worked in our lives, or in the lives of those we know, to break the ice and get to know people.
Learn Names – do whatever it takes to learn the names of your neighbors (parents, kids, pets, etc.). I make a neighborhood map on the computer and filled in names and a couple details about the neighbor to help me remember better (occupation, time in the house, an interesting fact).
Be Present where Neighbors Congregate – be present where people are. If people walk in front of the building or house, then be there. If there’s a pool, lounge area, or local park, then be there. If neighbors are helping at school events, community events, or a local nursing home, then be there. It’s important to go where your neighbors are to be present in their lives. This is not meant to suggest doing anything unsafe or intrusive, but to live life next to and with those closest to you. Two things we did to meet neighbors was play in our front yard with our kids instead of in the back and buy a swing for neighborhood kids to play on. The swing is about five feet from our front sidewalk at a height any kid could get into, and we let parents know it’s there for everyone to use. This has brought many people to our front yard multiple times a month, which over a few years, leads to dozens of interactions that were less likely to happen. A side benefit of this has been the fact the neighbors have gotten to know other neighbors because they’re sharing our front yard and swing, even when we’re not home!
Create Opportunities to Connect – in addition to the above two activities, a third focus area is to set-up events or circumstances that bring people together from your neighborhood. This could be an invitation to do things near where you live, such as having a sandbox play-date with kids, sharing tools, asking for ingredients instead of going to the store, inviting someone to help you with a project, hosting a block party, or setting up a bus stop hot chocolate bar on a cold day. It could also be an opportunity to get together apart from your neighborhood such as going out for coffee, attending a local art or sporting event, or volunteering for a community service event together. Your creativity is the limit. We have initiated or been invited to participate in all of the above activities. An interesting observation of my own attitude on this is that I much prefer to initiate and control the activity than receive the invitation. However, being grateful and humble opens more doors than continually asking. For example, only after I asked for help on a project or to borrow a tool would some neighbors be willing to ask me for help or to borrow a tool. Being vulnerable is an important and often overlooked character trait.
Many of the above activities happened across multiple years. Each connection point is another step toward knowing your neighbors and building a more integrated and connected community. Some things will be great (a block party where everyone comes) and others will fall flat (a block party where no one comes), but it’s too important of an opportunity to sit idly by – try something else and keep going.
Take a first step or the next step, but move forward and be proactive. Let us know how it goes.
Share things that have worked well with your neighbors or ideas you have with the Walk the Block community.
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